As pervasive environments become more commonplace, the privacy of users is placed at increased risk. The numerous and diverse
sensors in these environments can record users’ contextual information, leading to users unwittingly leaving “digital footprints.”
Users must thus be allowed to control how their digital footprints are reported to third parties. While a significant amount
of prior work has focused on location privacy, location is only one type of footprint, and we expect most users to be incapable
of specifying fine-grained policies for a multitude of footprints. In this paper we present a policy language based on the
metaphor of physical walls, and posit that users will find this abstraction to be an intuitive way to control access to their
digital footprints. For example, users understand the privacy implications of meeting in a room enclosed by physical walls.
By allowing users to deploy “virtual walls,” they can control the privacy of their digital footprints much in the same way
they control their privacy in the physical world. We present a policy framework and model for virtual walls with three levels
of transparency that correspond to intuitive levels of privacy, and the results of a user study that indicates that our model
is easy to understand and use.
This research program is a part of the Institute for Security Technology Studies and was supported by the Bureau of Justice
Assistance under grant 2005-DD-BX-1091. The views and conclusions do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States
Department of Justice.